Bruna Dantas Lobato
is an intern for The Millions. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in BOMB, Ploughshares online, Music & Literature, Words Without Borders, and elsewhere. She is currently the assistant fiction editor for Washington Square Review. She tweets at @bdantaslobato.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, Ernest Hemingway’sA Moveable Feast has rocketed to number one best-seller status in France as an emblem of cultural defiance. With a title in its French iteration that roughly translates to “Paris is a celebration,” the sudden popularity of the book run even Amazon out of stock.

To date, Hercule Poirot, the Belgian detective created by Agatha Christie, is the only fictional character to get his own obit in the Times. At the LARB, Rumblr editor Molly McArdle looks back on Poirot, the very long-running TV series that ended on November 13th. (h/t The Rumpus)

Vladimir Nabokov, who lived a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies and a Harvard museum curator, has had his theory on butterfly evolution finally proved sixty-five years later. (Thanks, Kevin)

We care quite a bit about book covers here at The Millions, hence our recentrounds of cover-judging. To honor the hundredth anniversary of Tolstoy’s death, Flavorwirehas compiled a selection of Anna Karenina‘s many covers, and opportunities for judgement abound.

“[C]hildren often prefer the factual over the fantastical. And a growing body of work suggests that when it comes to storybooks, they also learn better from stories that are realistic. For example, preschool-aged children are more likely to learn new facts about animals when the animals are portrayed realistically as opposed to anthropomorphically.” Two new studies suggest that where learning is concerned, realism trumps fantasy in children’s books. Which is as good a time as any to ask our own Jacob Lambert‘s question: Are picture books leading our children astray?